Salem Political Snark

Read how the Republican Party views the insurrection as normal

The Republican Party now officially supports the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 that sought to overturn Biden's free and fair election and make Trump the presidential victor.

Today the Republican National Committee approved the resolution below. I'll also share it as a PDF file.
Download RNC Resolution

It states in the last "WHEREAS" that those who stormed the Capitol, injuring hundreds of police officers and leading to several deaths, were "ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse." 

Shameful. Unpatriotic. Disgusting.

Keep this in mind next time you see a ballot with an R after someone's name. Don't vote for someone who belongs to a political party that thinks it's just fine to try to overturn an election because their leader, Donald Trump, has spewed his Big Lie that the election was stolen.

We know this is the case, because the objects of the resolution's wrath, Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, are members of the bipartisan House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. 

The committee isn't concerned about "legitimate political discourse."

They're looking into a coordinated, well-planned scheme to have Vice-President Pence declare that certified election results in a number of swing states won by Biden were invalid, thereby preventing Biden from getting enough electoral votes to be president. 

Then the plan was for Republican-controlled state legislatures to declare that a Trump slate of electors should be counted, thereby giving Trump an illegitimate victory. This was horribly disturbing when it appeared that the scheme was only supported by fringe elements of the Republican Party.

But now we know that the Republican National Committee, which is made up of party leaders from every state, fully endorses the Trump insurrection and opposes the effort to prevent another attempt to overthrow a free and fair election that Cheney and Kinzinger are part of.

Read the resolution and you'll see how authoritarian and hypocritical the Republican Party has become. The GOP supposedly derides "cancel culture" and political correctness. However, the resolution censures Cheney and Kinzinger because they dared to think for themselves and defy Trump. 

The resolution also says that the primary goal of the House Republican Conference is to win back control of Congress. Not to make things better for the American people. Not to protect our democracy.

Just to win. At any cost.

Including doing away with the values that used to make the Republican Party a reasonable alternative to the Democratic Party. Now the not-so Grand Old Party is entirely dedicated to kissing Trump's ass, no matter how bad this is for the country.

Why I'm worried about Putin invading Ukraine

Most Americans don't seem to be very worried about the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, invading Ukraine, even though Putin has massed over a hundred thousand troops on the Ukraine border, along with everything needed to invade the country that used to be part of the Soviet Union.

But I'm deeply concerned. Here's some reasons.

First, being 73, I grew up during the height of the Cold War. Above-ground nuclear tests were being conducted in Nevada on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountains where I lived in California. People were building bomb shelters and stockpiling supplies in case the United and Soviet Union started firing nuclear weapons at each other.

In 1962 an eighth-grade friend and I conducted a "Hines-Hart" poll asking our classmates if they thought a nuclear war would happen soon. I recall that most of them did. Fortunately, they were wrong.

But war with the Soviet Union was a lingering source of anxiety in the 1950's and 60's. I'd look around our concrete block house, trying to figure out where the safest place would be if radioactivity drifted over us following a nuclear exchange. 

So when I watched Bill Maher's HBO show last Friday, it was irritating to hear Maher say that he didn't think NATO was needed any more, since NATO was established to prevent the Soviet Union from attacking Europe, and the Soviet Union no longer existed. 

I yelled at the TV, "Bill, you idiot, Putin is trying to re-establish the Soviet Union by expanding Russia's sphere of influence in the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union! That's why NATO is needed now as much as it ever was."

Since Putin is making such a serious threat against Ukraine, which doesn't belong to NATO but has a halfway decent military, there seems little doubt that if NATO didn't exist, the small former Soviet block countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would be part of a reconstituted Soviet Union before too long.

Last night my wife and I finished watching Munich: The Edge of War on Netflix. It's a timely movie, having cogent lessons for the Ukraine crisis. 

In 1938 Hitler convinced Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, that all Germany wanted was some additional room for the German people to live in. So if Hitler could just take over a part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, that's all he wanted, and peace would reign.

Of course, the peace only lasted a year. Then World War II broke out after Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939. 

Putin has already taken over part of eastern Ukraine via thinly-disguised "militia" backed by Russia. He also was able to annex the Crimean Peninsula area of Ukraine in 2014. So far Putin hasn't suffered serious consequences from either move, which gives him confidence he could get away with taking over all of Ukraine.

Biden is doing fairly well in managing the current Ukraine crisis.

However, it bothers me that the Biden administration seems overly concerned about provoking Putin by taking steps to admit Ukraine into NATO, which should have happened after 2014, and imposing tough sanctions on Russia now, rather than after he invades Ukraine. 

Neither the United States, nor the world, wants to see the Soviet Union come back to life under Putin. Well, let's make that most of the world. No doubt China and North Korea would like to see Putin take over Ukraine, as this would weaken U.S. influence and hurt Biden's already shaky presidency.

If Putin is able to invade Ukraine without Russia suffering truly horrible consequences, this will embolden other countries to try the same thing with weaker nearby nations. China already is making noises about taking Taiwan by force. 

If Putin gets away with invading Ukraine, China will be more likely to do the same with Taiwan. The world will be a much more dangerous place if national borders can be erased by whoever has a large enough military to do the erasing.

Hopefully my worrying about Ukraine is misplaced.

It just seems increasingly unlikely that Putin has gone through such a massive military buildup on Ukraine's border and now will simply walk away from that confrontation without getting major concessions in return -- which the United States correctly doesn't want to give Putin.

Here's my plan about how Biden can bounce back

Ten days ago I wrote about how bothered I am by how poorly Biden has been performing as president. Today I watched Meet the Press and saw that I'm not alone in being disappointed by Biden.

But after sharing some of the bad news on Meet the Press, I'm gong to light a Biden candle instead of cursing the darkness of his dismal poll results at this point in his presidency.

So scroll past the depressing (unless you're a Republican) photos I took of some survey results, and you'll find my prescription for how Biden can restore the mojo that progressives like me want him to possess.

OK, that's definitely ghastly. The groups that produced Biden's win over Trump now are souring on him.

It's possible to debate whether that's justified, since Republican obstructionism, along with Manchin and Sinema holding back voting rights legislation and the Build Back Better bill from within the Democratic Party, are a big part of the reason Biden hasn't had a political win for a while.

But politics isn't about fairness. It's about winning, while doing what's best for the country. So here's my plan for getting Biden out of the popularity black hole he's currently trapped in.

(1) Be much more forceful about tooting your own horn. It looks like Biden has started to do this. His recent press conference was a decent start. But Biden and the rest of his team need to shamelessly plug what's been accomplished through the Covid relief bills passed last year and the benefits the bipartisan infrastructure bill will bring, along with other administration actions.

(2) Go all out on combatting Covid. As the coronavirus goes, so will Biden's presidency and Democratic hopes in the November midterm election. It's good to see that Covid tests are becoming more available at no or little cost to people. This should have happened earlier, but better late than never. Call out Republican governors and judges who stand in the way of public health measures needed to get the coronavirus under control.

(3) Let Manchin write a scaled-down Build Back Better bill. Biden should forget about fulfilling every Democratic wish list. Whatever Joe Manchin wants in the Build Back Better bill, let him have it. The key thing is to preserve the half trillion dollars to fight climate change. Getting that done will go a long way toward pleasing progressives, independents, and young people concerned about global warming. Anything else is a bonus: lowering prescription drug prices, universal pre-kindergarten, etc.

(4) Get tough with Putin over Ukraine. After the not-so-good pullout from Afghanistan, it's important for Biden to look like a strong competent leader when it comes to foreign affairs. Today I saw reports that the United States is planning to back an insurgency in Ukraine if Russia invades the country, and will send troops to the Baltic nations that used to be part of the USSR. Good moves. Even better would be preventing an invasion through very tough specific threats to Putin about what will happen if he invades Ukraine. 

(5) Showcase Kamala Harris with voting rights. Biden picked a woman of color to be his vice-president. His approval rating is sinking with women and Blacks. Biden needs to elevate Harris to a much more prominent role in his administration. She's supposed to be working on voting rights, but Harris isn't very visible on this crucial issue.

Harris should have a press conference every couple of weeks where she lays out what the Biden administration is doing to counter Republican efforts at voter suppression and manipulation of election results. Not as good as a voting rights bill, but no bill is going to pass so long as Sinema and Manchin refuse to do away with or modify the Senate filibuster. 

I'm a loyal Democrat who's already tired of Joe Biden

Joe Biden was really appealing when the alternative was Donald Trump. But after a year of Biden's presidency, my attitude toward him ranges from grudging acceptance to outright irritation.

Today I'm at the bottom of my personal Joe Biden approval rating. And there's a good chance my mood is going to darken further.

I've got this theory -- not exactly original to me -- that a person's good qualities also are their bad qualities. It just depends on how those qualities are expressed, and their context.

Along with lots of other people, I relished having a calm, competent, low-key president in the White House after four years of Trumpian chaos. Now, though, those qualities are looking more like liabilities, especially since competent is fading away as a Biden descriptor.

My current gripe with Biden, and it's a significant one, is that he pretty much ignored voting rights legislation until very recently, when he gave a speech in Georgia about the urgent need for Congress to pass two voting rights bills.

Too late and too little, Joe. 

Today Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin both announced that they aren't willing to do away with the Senate filibuster even if that's necessary to pass voting rights legislation, which it definitely is. 

Also today, Sinema and Manchin met with Biden at the White House to discuss their position on the filibuster. So far there hasn't been any word that Biden changed their mind, probably because he didn't.

I get it that Sinema and Manchin are really difficult to deal with, being full of themselves, refusing to negotiate in an honest fashion, and uncaring of whether they're acting in the best interest of their constituents in Arizona and West Virginia.

Still, it sure seems like Biden has been weak in how he's interacted with them, choosing to play the role of Mr. Nice Guy rather than President Who Should Be Feared. 

Lyndon Johnson played that latter role well. So did Trump. Again, I don't want Biden to be Trump-lite, just that he display some of the aggression and passion that makes Trump beloved by his base.

Early on in January 2021, congressional Democrats said that voting rights bills would be a top priority. As Republicans in state after state passed their own legislation to make it harder to vote, especially for  black and brown people, voting rights should have risen to the top of Biden's agenda.

But it didn't. 

Covid relief bills did. Then the bipartisan infrastructure bill did. After that, the Build Back Better bill was pushed by Biden.

It made sense to focus on Covid given how the pandemic was ravaging our country. However, Biden botched the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was supposed to go hand-in-hand with the Build Back Better bill -- social/climate change infrastrucure as opposed to physical infrastructure. 

Manchin and Sinema were heavily invested in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That should have given Biden leverage for him to use in pressing for them to do a carve-out of the filibuster on voting rights legislation.

And leverage to get them to commit to supporting the Build Back Better bill. Now that bill is stuck, going nowhere fast. Biden seems to have given up on it after Manchin said he's done talking about it. 

Yet last year Biden cajoled progressive House Democrats to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which already had been approved by the Senate, when he assured them that Manchin had bought off on a framework for Build Back Better, so now the two bills could be decoupled.

Build Back Better contains half a billion dollars or so of vitally needed support for our country's efforts to combat global warming. 

So Biden is batting .000 on the two legislative areas that mean the most to me, and many other Democrats: voting rights and climate change. I've read that Manchin was willing to go along with a $1.8 trillion Build Back Better bill that included all that money to fight global warming.

Biden reportedly walked away from that agreement for some reason. Unforgivable. 

Since I'm 73, not a whole lot younger than Biden, it pains me to say that Biden is looking more and more to me like a kindly grandfather whose best days are behind him.

Sadly, he hasn't given Vice-President Harris much of a viable role in his administration, because while Harris has her own weaknesses, she's more energetic and a much better speaker.

My mood toward Biden definitely would perk up if somehow he could pull off a win on either voting rights or Build Back Better.

Right now, though, it looks like neither legislation is going to pass. Since Republicans are favored to take back the House in November of this year, this means Biden has little time left to get his first term agenda through Congress.

And I haven't even mentioned the failure of Biden and his fellow Democrats to do anything about police reform and immigration reform. No wonder Biden's approval rating is so low. When he's losing many members of his own party, there's no way to go but down.

Every Republican candidate should answer four questions

Our democracy is in grave danger. Not from an outside enemy. From within -- the Republican Party. This is a tweet shared on MSNBC today. MAGA, of course, is Trump's slogan: Make America Great Again.

If only Republican leaders were behind the party's anti-democracy movement, there wouldn't be as much reason for concern. Or, panic. But two-thirds of Republicans wrongly believe Biden wasn't elected legitimately.

Trump's Big Lie that the election was stolen from him has infected the minds of a clear majority of Republicans. This has made agreeing with the Big Lie a prerequisite for Republican candidates who want to win an election by garnering the support of their fellow GOP members.

Which means every Republican candidate for local, state, or national office should have to answer four questions put forth by Representative Eric Slalwell (D - California) on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show today. I've fiddled with the wording of a couple of the questions to make them clearer.

(1) Do you acknowledge that Joe Biden is the legitimately-elected president?
(2) Do you disavow QAnon?
(3) Do you agree that the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in your state in 2024 should get all of that state's electoral votes? (unless the state is one that splits electoral votes)
(4) Do you disavow violence following an election by supporters of the losing candidate?

These questions also should be asked of every candidate running for a non-partisan office, like Mayor of Salem or the Salem City Council. Republican candidates shouldn't be able to ignore the questions just because the ballot don't have a "R" after their name.

On January 1 the New York Times editorial board published "Every Day Is Jan. 6 now." I learned about it on today's Chris Hayes MSNBC show. The movement, of course, is the Trump-addled portion of the Republican Party, which as noted before, is a clear majority of the GOP.

Here's some additional quotes from the editorial.

Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.

It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.

...A healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time. The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has shown itself recently to be incapable of doing this. Party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.

Note what's said in the last paragraph above. Read it again. Let it sink into your consciousness. 

The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over...

Manchin puts Build Back Better bill on life support

It wasn't a great way to wake up this morning.

With sleepy eyes, I picked up my iPhone to see what was new with the world, only to be met with a red banner notification from the New York Times saying that Senator Joe Manchin was a no on the Build Back Better bill.

Wow. Not totally unexpected, but since President Biden had been having frequent talks with Manchin recently, I figured they were working out details of what it would take for Manchin to support the bill.

Instead, Manchin went on Fox News to make his announcement. I guess he was smart enough to realize that MSNBC or CNN anchors would ask some tough questions, while Fox News wouldn't -- since anything that hurts Biden and the Democrats gets a big thumbs-up from Fox.

The White House clearly was deeply pissed-off with Manchin. A statement from the Press Secretary didn't mince words about how they felt betrayed by the conservative Democratic senator from West Virginia. 

Senator Manchin’s comments this morning on FOX are at odds with his discussions this week with the President, with White House staff, and with his own public utterances. Weeks ago, Senator Manchin committed to the President, at his home in Wilmington, to support the Build Back Better framework that the President then subsequently announced. Senator Manchin pledged repeatedly to negotiate on finalizing that framework “in good faith.”

...Just as Senator Manchin reversed his position on Build Back Better this morning, we will continue to press him to see if he will reverse his position yet again, to honor his prior commitments and be true to his word.

In the meantime, Senator Manchin will have to explain to those families paying $1,000 a month for insulin why they need to keep paying that, instead of $35 for that vital medicine. He will have to explain to the nearly two million women who would get the affordable day care they need to return to work why he opposes a plan to get them the help they need. Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone—we cannot.

Now that Manchin has gone back on his word, this puts Biden in a tough position. His approval rating already was tanking. Even though the Build Back Better bill isn't dead, it's on life support. And this bill includes many of Biden's campaign promises.

Progressives in Congress, along with regular progressives like me, are going to find it hard to forget that Biden assured the Congressional Progressive Caucus (almost all of whom are House members) that it was OK to decouple the bipartisan infrastructure bill from Build Back Better, since supposedly Manchin had agreed to support the BBB framework and Biden said it would get all 50 Democratic votes in the Senate.

So House progressives agreed to vote in favor of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which had already passed in the Senate, rather than hold it hostage until Build Back Better had been approved by the Senate.

Today Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Progressive Caucus, said that she didn't regret decoupling the bills, even though the fear of many progressives has come true -- that once the bipartisan infrastructure bill backed by Manchin had become law, this took away leverage needed to get his vote for Build Back Better.

Of course, it might be that Manchin would have walked away from both bills if more pressure had been put on him. However, I agree with a Washington Post opinion piece, "Manchin's rebuff of Build Back Better is the latest failure of Democrats playing soft."

President Biden & Co. could have kept infrastructure and social spending in one bill, but they wrongly believed the aura of bipartisanship and “good faith” would better persuade conservative Democrats such as Manchin.

Similarly, under President Barack Obama, Democrats trimmed the desperately needed stimulus in fruitless pursuit of Republican votes, wasted months trying to find Republican backing for the Affordable Care Act and failed to fill numerous judgeships because they waited too long to weaken the Senate filibuster.

On the other side, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) refusal to consider Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court was brazenly hypocritical and partisan. Not everyone in his caucus supported it. But McConnell ignored the calls for comity, and now the Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority.

Perhaps the votes were never there for a mammoth infrastructure/health-care/climate/child-care bill. Perhaps a 50-50 Senate was always too narrow a margin to overcome. But from the moment Biden introduced his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan in the spring, it was clear his economic agenda’s best chance for survival was to keep everything in one bill.

Either that package would get the votes it needed, or the White House could pivot quickly to something less ambitious but passable, instead of wasting months on useless cajoling. Now, because Democrats played soft yet again, a tough midterm year gets even tougher, and millions of Americans won’t get the help they need.

Well, there's still a chance Build Back Better can be brought off life support and become law. Manchin is irked that the plan has provisions, like the child tax credit, which expire before the 10-year budgeting period is up.

Manchin views this as a gimmick, which it is. But it's a gimmick used by Republicans also, and the Democrats are being more honest about what they're up to than the GOP has been.

Still, there's a possibility Manchin could be enticed to vote for a fully-paid-for bill that includes just a few policy areas in a $1.5 trillion or so price tag. Today our Oregon Senator Ron Wyden issued a statement along that line.

Washington, D.C. – Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today released the following statement on the path forward for the Build Back Better agenda:

“It’s extremely disappointing to have to drop any major priorities because of Republican obstruction and the constraints of legislating in a fifty-fifty Senate, however, Democrats have made key promises to families who need more support. Failure is not an option here.

“A package that addresses critical priorities over the long-term, like providing financial security for families, lowering the costs of health care and prescription drugs for seniors, and creating clean energy jobs by combating the climate crisis would go a long way toward addressing our challenges. The Finance Committee has put forward a revenue menu with more than enough options to permanently pay for these priorities.

“Families received their sixth child tax credit payment last week, and they have come to depend on these payments to cover the essentials like rent, groceries, heat, and clothing for their children. Food insecurity among families dropped by about 25 percent since these payments began. Child poverty has been cut nearly in half. This program is Social Security for our children, and Democrats must keep it going over the long-term.

“This is our last chance to prevent the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis. The linchpin of the clean energy package is permanent, technology-neutral incentives tied to carbon emissions reductions. Fossil fuels that get cleaner are eligible for incentives, just like solar or wind. This package is supported by utility companies and environmental advocates alike and it’s the only path forward that can secure 50 votes and achieve significant emissions reductions in the power sector. Senator Manchin has long said he would only support technology-neutral incentives, and that’s exactly what this package is structured around.

“Democrats also must deliver on our promise to lower Americans’ health care costs, which are crushing to family budgets. Drug companies have been mugging Americans at the pharmacy window for too long, and there may not be another opportunity anytime soon for Democrats to put a stop to it. Fifty million seniors in Medicare have a lot of bargaining power, and it’s long past due to put it to use. Earlier this year Democrats also expanded the Affordable Care Act’s tax credits for health coverage, and it’s vital that we extend those subsidies to make coverage affordable. At a time when many American families are concerned about basic costs of living going up, Democrats cannot allow their health care costs to increase unnecessarily.”

Outrage should follow Supreme Court denial of abortion right

It's time for all liberty-loving Americans to fire up their outrage engine in anticipation of the Supreme Court either overturning Roe v. Wade entirely, or eviscerating it so that abortion rights exist only in name only.

That's the takeaway after today's astoundingly dreadful hearing on a Mississippi law that denies an abortion later than 15 weeks after a woman's last menstrual period. Observers came away feeling that almost certainly that law will be upheld. 

This is a big deal. For almost fifty years, since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, the test for when an abortion can happen has been viability, the ability of a fetus to survive outside the womb -- 24 to 28 weeks.

So if the Supreme Court allows states to set their own limit on when an abortion can be performed, who knows how early that will be? Six weeks, as the notorious "bounty" Texas law says? Four weeks? One week?

Such would amount to overturning Roe v. Wade, even if the Supreme Court lets that decision stand. But legal observers believe there's at least five votes on the nine-member court to do away with Roe entirely, with John Roberts a maybe.

I'm old enough to remember what life was like for pregnant women who didn't want to bear a child before abortion was legal everywhere. Unfortunately, most people don't, because they've grown up in a country where a woman's right to choose was settled law.

Women died after attempting a "back alley" abortion. Or suffered serious injuries. Roe v. Wade changed all that. But ever since, anti-abortion zealots, mostly conservative, have dreamed of a Supreme Court stacked with justices who felt like they do.

Now they have that court, thanks to Trump being able to appoint three justices, two unfairly. 

It's hard for me to decide what was most irritating about how the six conservative justices looked upon the legal arguments today. I guess it was Amy Coney Barrett saying that not being able to get an abortion is no big deal, because a woman can always put up her baby for adoption.

Barrett makes it sound like this is as simple as taking an unwanted puppy to a Humane Society shelter. Actually, it can be hugely traumatic to be forced to endure a forced nine-month pregnancy, then give up the baby. An attorney representing the only Mississippi clinic offering abortions made that clear.

First, the lawyer points out that adoption has indeed existed since Roe was first decided and therefore changes to adoption should not mean much. Then, she goes on to make the obvious points that pregnancy and birth in particular have dramatic effects on a woman’s health, and later she suggests that the choice to give a child up for adoption is its own burden, not something to lightly suggest is easy.

We have to remember how crazy it is that the Supreme Court is close to overturning Roe v. Wade. That case is founded on liberty, a woman's right to choose what she does with her body.

Every American who views liberty as a fundamental right should be outraged that we're just months away from the very real possibility that in about half the states, pregnant women are going to be forced to give birth to a child whether they want to or not.

And likely the six conservative Supreme Court justices aren't going to stop there. Today they sounded open to leaving other matters of settled law up to individual states to decide -- as if our constitutional rights should depend on where we live.

So same-sex marriage could be the next issue left up to the states. Or a woman's right to contraception. 

Keep this in mind when you vote in the 2022 mid-term election. And in the 2024 presidential election. Republicans are going all-out to take our liberty away. They dream of having Trump return as an authoritarian ruler. The Supreme Court is part of that scheme.

Today Justice Sotomayor spoke bluntly about how the Court will be viewed if citizens see that their decisions are purely political. But I suspect the six conservative justices don't care about this. They're after power, not sound legal decisions. 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether the legitimacy of the Supreme Court would endure if it overturned abortion rights during a landmark hearing on a Mississippi law restricting the procedure.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Sotomayor said during oral arguments Wednesday morning. “I don’t see how it is possible.”

Bad and good news for Oregon Democrats after Tuesday's elections

Yesterday was horrible for Democrats. There's no other way to put it. 

After going for Biden over Trump by ten points in 2020, Virginia elected the Republican candidate for Governor, Glenn Youngkin, by several points. He was endorsed by Trump, but avoided an overly close connection with Trump. And it looks like the GOP will recapture the Virginia House of Delegates

Almost equally disturbing for Democrats was the close race for New Jersey Governor. That state went for Biden over Trump by sixteen points in 2020. The incumbent Governor, Democrat Philip Murphy, beat his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, by just 1 percent or so.

What could this mean for Oregon?

Well, Oregon voted for Biden over Trump by sixteen points, 56% to 40%. Exactly the same margin as New Jersey. So, sure, Oregon could elect a Republican Governor in November 2022, and Democrats could see their margin in the state House and Senate whittled down or even eliminated.

But wasn't the bad showing for Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey caused by a much larger turnout of passionate Trump supporters, compared to other voters, something that's much less likely to happen in the 2022 midterm election?

Not really.

In Virginia at least, where there's been more analysis of yesterday's results, the problem for Democrats was that Republicans got a larger share of the vote across the board, including independent-leaning suburban voters who were a big part of Biden's victory in 2020. 

That said, there was indeed lower turnout among 2020 Biden voters, probably because they're disturbed by how little of Biden's agenda Congressional Democrats have been able to pass so far, even though they control both the Senate and House, albeit by very slim margins. 

The main good news for Democrats in Oregon and elsewhere is that this is November 2021, a year from the 2022 midterms and three years from the 2024 presidential election. 

There's still time for Congress to pass the two infrastructure bills, physical and social, hopefully along with some sort of immigration reform, policing reform, and most importantly, voting rights legislation. I've been bothered by the lack of urgency from Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress.

They seem to think there's a good chance Democrats will maintain control of both the Senate and House following the 2022 midterm election. Well, that chance was slim prior to yesterday's results in Virginia and New Jersey. 

Given how poorly Democrats performed, the odds now are considerably higher that Republicans will be in control of one or both houses of Congress after the 2022 election. So Biden needs to pull out all the stops, including pressuring Manchin and Sinema to do away with the filibuster for voting rights bills.

However, one more bit of bad news is that Virginia and New Jersey hadn't passed voter suppression legislation. This shows that Republicans can win elections in blue states fair and square. It'd be nice if the GOP realized this means they can stop with trying to make it harder to vote. But that isn't going to happen.

On the good news front, in Virginia Glenn Youngkin was chosen as the Republican governor candidate in an unusual fashion that seemed designed to prevent a Trumpist crazy candidate from being nominated. 

Seven candidates competed in an unusual and controversial "unassembled convention" Saturday, when 28,000 Republican voters and activists cast weighted and ranked-choice ballots at dozens of locations across the state after the party opted against a standard primary.

It seems unlikely that Oregon Republicans will be able to resist choosing a far right-wing candidate in their primary to pick the GOP candidate for governor. Youngkin would be viewed as too moderate by most Republicans, so I'm betting that Oregon will see a more Trump-like candidate go up against the Democrat nominee.

Youngkin benefitted from being a fresh face in Virginia politics, while McAuliffe had been governor before (Virginia doesn't allow the governor to serve two consecutive terms, for some weird reason).

This makes me think that former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has announced his candidacy for Oregon governor, could be an appealing choice. He wouldn't have the political baggage that other candidates like House Speaker Tina Kotek would bring to the race.

Regardless who the Democratic candidate is, it seems clear that their campaign can't be based on being opposed to Trump. That didn't work for McAuliffe in Virginia, though it was successful for Joe Biden when Trump was still president, still on Twitter, and still saying his usual crazy stuff.

My other piece of advice for Oregon Democrats in 2022 is to campaign as aggressively and with as much passion as Republicans have been doing. Social/cultural issues are going to keep on being emphasized by Republican candidates, since that worked well for them in Virginia.

Race has to be handled more wisely by Democrats than decrying attacks on Critical Race Theory. Sure, that isn't taught in schools other than colleges.

But Youngkin appeared to benefit by appearing Obama-like in his view that America's goal should be to view people as who they are, not as Black, Brown, White, or whatever. Wiser political minds than what I possess are arguing persuasively that Democrats have to find a way to talk about race that doesn't serve up Republican talking points like the horrible "Defund the Police."

Minneapolis voted down a proposal to do away with the police department, even though that's where George Floyd's murder happened. Blacks don't want to do away with police; they want common sense reforms of how police departments operate.

The woke far left can't be allowed to dominate Democratic politics, not in Oregon, not anywhere else. There's a big difference between pushing popular issues like paid family leave and lowering the price of prescription drugs, and pushing highly controversial topics like all whites are racist, even if they don't know it.

Here's a sampling of tweets I've come across that are related to yesterday's election.

 

Sustaining Democracy book fizzles out on how to do it

I loved Robert Talisse's Sustaining Democracy book. Until I read the final chapter.

Then I felt the same letdown as when I put in many hours watching a TV series that promises to eventually tie together compelling plot threads in a satisfying fashion, only to find that the final episode falls flat.

But this doesn't take away from the brilliance of Talisse's analysis of what typically goes wrong in a democracy. It has a certain Marxist feel, since he persuasively argues that a democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.

In brief, his argument is that democracies want citizens to be actively engaged in politics.

Ideally they're able to balance democracy's twin goals of (1) viewing all citizens, political friends and foes alike, as having an equal right to participate in the democracy, and (2) pursuing justice.

Problem is, these goals tend to diverge.

The more avidly people engage in fighting hard for justice, the more they come to see their political opponents as standing in the way. This leads to an attitude of, If something has to go, viewing the opposition as equals or achieving justice, let's dump the equality thing.

So, we get partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, intense efforts to not only win elections but to ensure that our opponents never have a chance to get back in power and undo the justice that we hope to achieve.

Talisse goes into much more detail, of course, along with discussing how belief polarization makes the situation even worse. He defines this as "the phenomenon by which interactions among like-minded people tend to result in each person adopting more radical versions of their shared views."

Taken to an extreme, this makes allies into enemies.

I've encountered this on Facebook groups frequented by fellow progressives. To offer an example, I support the Black Lives Matter movement. However, I decry the protests in Portland where businesses were vandalized.

That seems like a reasonable view. My political tribe should be able to accept differences of opinion about protest tactics, since we agree on the overarching goal of police reform. But I've been attacked as a fake progressive because I don't share the most extreme left-wing view.

Tallisse describes that dynamic in a sophisticated fashion.

Isn't it ironic? The democrat's dilemma arises in cases where it seems to us that treating our opponents as our equals impedes justice. Yet this very stance winds up undermining our political objectives.

To see how this works, let's rehearse a familiar line of reasoning: We see the opposition as advocating policies that are out of step with what justice demands, and this leads us to conclude that sustaining democratic relations with them only gives them an undeserved political advantage.

It then strikes us that by suspending democracy with them, we improve the chances of achieving justice. Hence, our zeal for justice occasions the democrat's dilemma. It supplies a compelling rationale for the claim that we should indeed suspend democratic relations with out opponents.

But this reasoning is flawed. The very same zeal for justice that motivates us to suspend democracy with our foes also heightens our exposure to belief polarization, which leads us to overstate our opponent's vices and to inflate our reasons for regarding them as divested from democracy.

Moreover, we have seen that once we have disengaged from our opposition, belief polarization works to dismantle our capacity to recognize good-faith disagreement among our allies. Our political coalitions thus devolve, which also damages the prospects for achieving justice as we see it.

Passages like that caused me to rapidly read his book. I found his take on democracy and politics to be right-on. As befits a philosophy professor whose focus is research on democratic theory, Talisse writes about the perils of how we're going about democracy in a gripping fashion.

Often I felt like I was reading a thriller novel. The suspense was building. The book was convincing me that our democracy faces serious problems that go way beyond the current Democrat - Republican, Biden - Trump freakouts. 

I could hardly wait to read the final chapter on how democracy can be sustained in the face of those threats. 

Sadly, I felt letdown.

In the end, Talisse sounded too much like an armchair philosophy professor and too little like a practical saving-democracy warrior. I was hoping for ideas that could actually be implemented, ideally with support of both major political parties.

Instead, I got an inward-looking, contemplative, sit-back-and-ponder suggestion for how democracy can be sustained.

I have laid out a two-step proposal. First, we can manage belief polarization within ourselves by establishing practices and habits that keep us mindful of the vulnerability of our political views to reasonable criticism. This calls us to seek out and engage with ideas of our reasonable critics.

...Second, we must supplement our public political engagement with occasions of political reflection by creating forms of distance from the fray of partisan politics. We must make space for political reflection, imagination, and self-examination.

OK. Nothing wrong with those ideas. But they seem totally inadequate to fix our ailing democracy.

The hordes are attacking the castle of our democracy with flaming balls of tar and volleys of arrows. I just can't see how looking inward is sufficient to prevent the potential destruction of what we need to protect with all our might.

I mean, here we are with Trumpist Republicans (meaning, a clear majority of one of our two major political parties) wrongly believing that the free and fair 2020 presidential election actually was fixed and crooked, and that Trump actually beat Biden.

Now those Trumpists are busily constructing what amounts to a catapult-like scheme designed to lob dangerous projectiles into the 2022 and 2024 elections that's a serious threat to our democracy.

There's no way only but a few Republicans are going to engage in the sort of inward-looking political exercises Talisse views as the best bet to sustain democracy. The GOP is going all out to win elections at any cost, even if that cost is anti-democratic.

So Talisse has written the right book at the wrong time. While its analysis of the problem is great, its advice as to how to deal with democracy's problems in the United States isn't in tune with what really is going on.

In fact, Talisse comes close to admitting this when he states repeatedly in his book that there's no obligation to play nice with people who refuse to abide by democratic norms, civil behavior, and reasonableness. 

Hopefully at some point in the future Talisse's final chapter will make sense for a kinder and gentler American democracy. At present, it would be a disaster for citizens to do anything other than fight the Trumpist attempt to subvert our democracy with passionate vigor -- not inward-looking contemplation.

If Democrats can't pass a voting rights bill, democracy dies

There are times when it makes sense to ignore the political mess that is Washington, DC. This isn't one of them.

Today may have marked a milestone in how our democracy died -- not through a violent coup, but through two Democratic senators refusing to do away with the Republican filibuster of the Freedom to Vote Act.

This is the replacement for the considerably more expansive voting rights act that started off as the first bill introduced in both the House and Senate, indicating how important it was to congressional Democrats.

However, Senator Manchin of West Virginia, who often sounds more like a Republican (and currently is rumored to be contemplating switching parties if he doesn't get his way on the Build Back Better reconciliation bill) objected to the original voting rights legislation.

Manchin claimed that if he was allowed to craft his own bill, he could find 10 Senate Republicans who would support it.

Well, today zero Republicans voted to begin debate on the Freedom to Vote Act, leaving it with 50 Democrats in favor and 50 Republicans in opposition.

(Majority Leader Schumer changed his vote to no so he could bring the bill up again, which is why the final tally was 49-51.)

Given how avidly Trump and his Republican cronies are working to steal the next presidential election if a Democrat ends up winning, it's super aggravating that President Biden is putting so much effort into getting the physical and social infrastructure bills passed, and so little effort in passing the Freedom to Vote Act.

All that's at stake is our democracy. Sure seems like that should be enough to light a fire under our overly complacent president and Democratic leaders in Congress.

They're acting like this is just the usual congressional gridlock and fighting between the parties. Not true.

The Freedom to Vote Act is urgently needed to slow down the Republican stampede of making it more difficult for people to vote -- especially black and brown people.

A New York Times analysis of this issue, "Democrats Search for Path on Voting Rights Amid Republican Blockade," lays out some of what's in the bill.

The bill would set federal standards for early and mail-in voting and make Election Day a national holiday, among other provisions. It would also mandate that voters provide some form of identification before casting a ballot, a requirement that many Democrats had previously resisted, although it would be far less restrictive than similar measures imposed by Republicans.

A Democratic fantasy is that once Manchin sees that the Freedom to Vote Act will never get 10 Republican votes in the Senate, he'll agree to doing away with the filibuster for voting rights legislation. I doubt that will happen.

Joe Manchin basically only cares about Joe Manchin, not democracy. He relishes his role as the conservative thorn in the side of Senate Democrats. And he wants to keep on being re-elected by West Virginia voters, which he believes will only happen if he acts like a Republican much of the time.

What's crazy is that Manchin likes to talk about how the filibuster is needed to preserve the Senate as "the world's greatest deliberative body."

That's a bunch of crap.

The Senate is one of the world's worst deliberative bodies, because the filibuster allows a minority of senators to prevent even discussion of a bill, much less a vote on it. And it's virtually certain that if Republicans ever regain control of the presidency and Congress, they'd do away with the filibuster in an instant if this was needed to pass right-wing legislation.

I realize that Biden and other Democratic leaders are in a tough position with Manchin. They can't afford to lose a single Democrat vote in the Senate. Playing along with Manchin is their only option. 

But they need to play tougher if Manchin and Sinema won't budge on doing away with the filibuster for voting rights legislation. Every option should be on the table for pressuring these two Democratic senators.

Maybe this is too extreme.

However, I like the idea of telling them that their precious physical infrastructure bill isn't going to be approved unless both the Build Back Better reconciliation bill and the Freedom to Vote Act are also passed. I just hate the prospect of American democracy dying because a couple of senators wanted to keep the stupid filibuster rule.